Chicago police are keeping busy confiscating “illegal guns.” Last year through the summer, the confiscations were occurring at a rate of one every 59 minutes according to Chicago Police Department figures related by Mark Berman in an October 2016 Washington Post article. This summer, the Chicago police will have some assistance from the United States government in racking up impressive gun confiscation numbers.

Following through on a plan that began its development during the Obama administration, the Trump administration and Chicago Police Department announced last week the sending of the Chicago Crime Gun Strike Force, involving an additional 20 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents plus equipment, to Chicago to aid city police, as well as state and US prosecutors, in a crackdown on illegal guns and the people who possess them.

Gun confiscation has been a big project in the city for years. In the May 27, 2014 Chicago Mayor’s Office and Chicago Police Department report “Tracing the Guns: The Impact of Illegal Guns on Violence in Chicago,” a comparison was made between gun confiscation numbers in Chicago and such numbers in Los Angeles and New York City. The report relates that the 7,624 guns the Chicago Police Department confiscated in 2012 amounted to more per capita than the gun confiscations by police in New York City and Los Angeles combined.

You may wonder what an illegal gun is. US law prohibits gun possession by individuals in certain classes of people, such as people who possess illegal drugs. US law also places special limits on the possession of certain types of guns. The US government, for example, bars people from owning fully automatic firearms, except for some such guns that may be possessed after permission is obtained from and a fee is paid to the US government. Similarly, the US government imposes a minimum barrel length requirement for shotguns. Remember when Randy Weaver and his family were subjected at their home to a US government siege? Back in 1989, an undercover ATF agent convinced Randy Weaver to sell a couple “sawed-off shotguns” allegedly in violation of US law. Weaver then did not appear in court in regard to the entrapment-derived gun charges on the correct day after a notice with the wrong date had been sent. Further US government actions included the killing of Weaver’s son and wife and the siege of the family’s Idaho home.

“Illegal guns” take on a broader meaning in Chicago. In addition to US government laws, state laws expand the scope or what is included in the category of illegal guns. In Illinois, people are even required to obtain from the state police a Firearm Owners Identification card (FOID card) to legally possess a gun or ammunition. Further, legislation signed into law in August by Governor Bruce Rauner makes it a felony for someone without a FOID card to bring a gun into Illinois from any other state in order to sell, deliver, or transfer the gun. The new law is argued to be necessary to stop people from buying guns in other states where gun laws are less restrictive and then bringing the guns in to Illinois, and to Chicago in particular. And Illinois gun restrictions extend beyond these measures. The pro-gun-control Law Center to Prevent Violence so approves the state’s gun control efforts that, in its Gun Law State Scorecard, it ranks Illinois eighth out of the fifty states.

In an October 19, 2016 presidential campaign debate against Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump criticized gun control in Chicago in response to a question regarding his opposition to limits on either assault weapons of high-capacity magazines and his support for a national right to carry law. Trump suggested that gun control is not the solution to violence in the city. In particular, Trump declared that, “In Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States, probably you could say by far, they have more gun violence than any other city.” Making his position on guns more clear, Trump followed up with this statement: “I am a very strong supporter of the Second Amendment.” Yet, here is Trump less than a year later sending in a newly created ATF strike force to help Chicago police confiscate guns (and to further punish the people who have possessed those guns), all in the name of reducing violence in the city. An explanation is in order.

Even if the US government attempts to prevent the ATF from aiding in the confiscation of guns based on state and local gun control measures, the ATF’s integrated action with the local police and state prosecutors on gun matters can be expected to unavoidably aid such confiscations, as well as related arrests and prosecutions. Now imagine a totally independent ATF presence in Chicago focused on enforcing only US gun laws — a much different mandate than the one that has been presented to the public. Under such a mandate, the ATF’s actions would still significantly aid the local and state gun confiscation and prosecution efforts. The ATF, by taking on some gun matters that the Chicago police and state prosecutors would otherwise deal with, would free up resources so that these police and prosecutors can engage in more gun confiscations and prosecutions related to alleged state and local law violations than they otherwise could.

To the extent the ATF is assisting in enforcing gun control laws that go beyond US gun control laws, it is acting in contravention of the US government’s gun policy. Consider state and local police in states that have legalized medical or recreational marijuana. They would be acting properly if they refuse to assist the US government in advancing the enforcing of US marijuana laws against people who are acting in compliance with the liberalized state laws. Similarly, agents of the US government should not assist state prosecutors or local police in enforcing gun laws that are more restrictive than the gun laws that have been adopted via the US government’s legislative process.

It would be naïve to trust that Chicago will be the only city in which we will see the Trump administration inserting US government agents to help local police. Sending the ATF strike force to Chicago appears to be a test case for Trump who campaigned on, and has promoted since his early days in the presidency, bringing “law and order” to cities where he says there is too much murder or violent crime. How far might Trump escalate US government involvement, in Chicago and beyond? Ron Paul, in a Monday Ron Paul Liberty Report discussion of the Trump administration’s Chicago actions, suggested the US government may in the future even send in the US military and implement martial law in the name of fighting crime in America.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

As the United States expands surveillance technologies on, above and below its 1,900-mile-long border with Mexico, operating them effectively grows more challenging.

Systems and industrial engineers at the University of Arizona are building a framework for border surveillance that uses artificial intelligence, based on realistic computer simulations, to integrate data from different sources and respond in real time.

“Our goal is to devise a system to most effectively, efficiently and safely deploy border patrol resources,” said Young-Jun Son, professor and head of the UA Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering and principal investigator of the project.

With some unmanned aerial vehicles at the border starting at $18 million apiece, their performance has implications for taxpayers as well as national security.

Air Force Funding for More Focused Surveillance

Son has received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to build an integrated and autonomous surveillance system for land and aerial vehicles monitoring the nation’s southern border. The project began in March 2017 and continues his previous AFOSR award of nearly the same amount for work in this area.

Young-Jun Son and his co-principal investigator, UA associate professor of systems and industrial engineering Jian Liu, specialize in helping manufacturers implement smart production systems, with Son’s main expertise in computer modeling and simulation, and Liu’s in statistics and data analysis.

With the Air Force funds, the researchers are applying these skills to help the federal government — ultimately, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection unit — gain a clearer picture of border activities for swifter, better-coordinated responses.

Homeland Security has used unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with cameras and radar for border surveillance since 2005. Flying at altitudes of 100 feet and far higher, the UAVs, or drones, can cover broad swaths of land and quickly detect activities that might be missed by fixed or mobile ground sensors, particularly in remote or mountainous areas.

Ground-based vehicles have their own advantages. Their sensors better detect objects on cloudy days or beneath trees and produce higher-quality images for better identifying individual objects or people.

The challenge for the UA researchers is to choose the right combination of aerial and ground vehicles, given different terrain and weather conditions, and activate them at just the right time.

“A major task of unmanned vehicles in patrol missions is to detect and find their targets’ locations in real time,” said research collaborator Sara Minaeian, a UA doctoral candidate in systems and industrial engineering. “This can be challenging for many reasons: for example, the surveillance vehicles and targets are all moving, and the landscape’s uneven nature may alter how targets appear.”

In a paper with Liu and Son published in the July 2016 edition of “IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems,” she describes their novel motion-detection and geo-localization algorithms for enabling aerial and ground vehicles to work in teams to precisely locate targets and decide how to respond.

The researchers have also been analyzing and testing different wireless network technologies for drones to communicate and cooperate over varied distances.

Balancing Act

Establishing when and where to send unmanned aerial vehicles versus personnel on foot or in trucks is a delicate balancing act. Factors to consider include fuel consumption at different altitudes, accessibility, weather conditions and whether subjects may be armed.

“Once we have detected, located and identified our targets of interest, we must decide which vehicles to deploy, and how many of each, to best meet objectives while considering tradeoffs of performance, cost and safety,” Son said.

“For example, to track a group of people moving in mountainous areas under clear blue skies, the optimal solution might be to deploy six UAVs and two trucks driven by border patrol agents; whereas for monitoring a group of the same size traveling in an urban area on a cloudy day, two UAVs and six ground patrol vehicles might be more effective.”

Son’s team will also be adding aerostats, increasingly used to tracking drug traffickers’ low-flying drones and intercept traffickers, in their AFOSR simulations.

The Human Factor

Using NASA geographical data from the border, the UA researchers have written hundreds of algorithms to simulate and predict how groups of people may move when traveling on flat desert and mountains, uninhabited areas and cities, in dry, dusty conditions or during monsoons.

While the UA researchers are not doing field tests at the U.S.-Mexico border, they are conducting experiments outside the lab. They have two quadcopter drones, one purchased and the other built with off-the shelf-parts, and a ground vehicle resembling a toy car. All are remote-controlled and carry a variety of sensors.

In experiments this spring, the researchers used an aerial drone outside on the UA Mall and inside the Student Union Memorial Center to track 10 student volunteers walking in a group before randomly dispersing. They also deployed their unmanned ground vehicle to identify individual people and served as a moving landmark to prevent the UAV from losing sight of its subjects.

The researchers are using their experimental data to better understand various crowd behaviors, such as gathering and splitting, and refine their algorithms to more accurately predict and track the crowd’s movements. From experiments with a few drones and students, the researchers are scaling up their simulations models to involve hundreds of drones and thousands of people.

“We believe that by integrating multiple surveillance technologies, we can far surpass their individual capabilities,” Son said. “In our integrated system, the sum is bigger than its parts.”

There are around 550 different bee species in Germany. Most of them are solitary bees. They don’t live in large beehives like the honeybee, but each female bee often builds multiple nests and feeds her offspring alone. Solitary bees use their short lifespan of a few weeks exclusively to reproduce and to provide food for their brood to develop into adult bees. Bees depend on the availability of pollen which they can frequently collect on specific plant species only.

Well-timed hatching is crucial

Therefore, good timing is crucial when the insects hatch. This is particularly true in early spring when there is the risk that no plants are available to the bee if it has emerged from hibernation too early. As global warming may have a different impact on the time when different species emerge in spring, temporal mismatches may occur between bee and plant species.

What happens when a bee hatches before its food plants start to flower and it has to do without food during the first days of its life? A team of researchers from the Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology of the University of Würzburg’s Biocenter has looked into this question. The scientists present the results of their work in the Journal of Animal Biology.

Temporal mismatches harm bees

The Collaborative Research Center “Insect Timing” has investigated three different species of spring-emerging bees. The findings of their study are alarming: “Already a minor temporal mismatch of three or six days is enough to harm the bees,” Mariela Schenk, the author of the study, explains.

For the purpose of the study, the researchers set up 36 large flight cages. This controlled environment allowed the scientists to make the bees hatch either simultaneously with the flowering of the plants in the cage or three and six days previously. Subsequently, they monitored the bees over their entire lifespan. The scientists recorded the daily activity of the bees and also how many nests and brood cells the bees produced.

What they found was that not all individuals survived three or six days without food plants. And the ones that made it exhibited less activity and reduced reproductive output.

Negative consequences despite change in behaviour

These negative consequences occurred even though the insects had adopted several behavioural strategies to mitigate the impact. One of the three bee species, for example, tried to reduce the effort of providing for the young by producing fewer female and more male offspring. Male offspring requires less food than the much bigger young females. “But this approach could result in a decline in population,” Mariela Schenk says.

Another bee species tried to save time in the production of offspring by distributing the same number of brood cells among fewer nests. This strategy, however, increases the risk that the entire brood falls prey to predators and parasites.

A further strategy one bee species adopted was to increase its activity in the second half of its life. But this method, too, was not sufficient to prevent negative consequences. Ecologist Mariela Schenk explains: “Although we found that the bee species we investigated developed species-specific strategies to mitigate the impact of temporal mismatches, the insects still suffered severe fitness loss.”

Reduced plant pollination

Dr Andrea Holzschuh, who is also an ecologist and in charge of the study, adds: “Not only can such developments further exacerbate the decline of solitary bees, they can also reduce plant pollination in general.” To make matters worse, the negative consequences of temporal mismatching of bees and plants seems to be particularly pronounced in very warm springs.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have enabled a computer to understand the body poses and movements of multiple people from video in real time — including, for the first time, the pose of each individual’s fingers.

This new method was developed with the help of the Panoptic Studio, a two-story dome embedded with 500 video cameras. The insights gained from experiments in that facility now make it possible to detect the pose of a group of people using a single camera and a laptop computer.

Yaser Sheikh, associate professor of robotics, said these methods for tracking 2-D human form and motion open up new ways for people and machines to interact with each other, and for people to use machines to better understand the world around them. The ability to recognize hand poses, for instance, will make it possible for people to interact with computers in new and more natural ways, such as communicating with computers simply by pointing at things.

Detecting the nuances of nonverbal communication between individuals will allow robots to serve in social spaces, allowing robots to perceive what people around them are doing, what moods they are in and whether they can be interrupted. A self-driving car could get an early warning that a pedestrian is about to step into the street by monitoring body language. Enabling machines to understand human behavior also could enable new approaches to behavioral diagnosis and rehabilitation for conditions such as autism, dyslexia and depression.

“We communicate almost as much with the movement of our bodies as we do with our voice,” Sheikh said. “But computers are more or less blind to it.”

In sports analytics, real-time pose detection will make it possible for computers not only to track the position of each player on the field of play, as is now the case, but to also know what players are doing with their arms, legs and heads at each point in time. The methods can be used for live events or applied to existing videos.

To encourage more research and applications, the researchers have released their computer code for both multiperson and hand-pose estimation. It already is being widely used by research groups, and more than 20 commercial groups, including automotive companies, have expressed interest in licensing the technology, Sheikh said.

Sheikh and his colleagues will present reports on their multiperson and hand-pose detection methods at CVPR 2017, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, July 21-26 in Honolulu.

Tracking multiple people in real time, particularly in social situations where they may be in contact with each other, presents a number of challenges. Simply using programs that track the pose of an individual does not work well when applied to each individual in a group, particularly when that group gets large. Sheikh and his colleagues took a bottom-up approach, which first localizes all the body parts in a scene — arms, legs, faces, etc. — and then associates those parts with particular individuals.

The challenges for hand detection are even greater. As people use their hands to hold objects and make gestures, a camera is unlikely to see all parts of the hand at the same time. Unlike the face and body, large datasets do not exist of hand images that have been laboriously annotated with labels of parts and positions.

But for every image that shows only part of the hand, there often exists another image from a different angle with a full or complementary view of the hand, said Hanbyul Joo, a Ph.D. student in robotics. That’s where the researchers made use of CMU’s multicamera Panoptic Studio.

“A single shot gives you 500 views of a person’s hand, plus it automatically annotates the hand position,” Joo explained. “Hands are too small to be annotated by most of our cameras, however, so for this study we used just 31 high-definition cameras, but still were able to build a massive data set.”

Joo and Tomas Simon, another Ph.D. student, used their hands to generate thousands of views.

“The Panoptic Studio supercharges our research,” Sheikh said. It now is being used to improve body, face and hand detectors by jointly training them. Also, as work progresses to move from the 2-D models of humans to 3-D models, the facility’s ability to automatically generate annotated images will be crucial.

When the Panoptic Studio was built a decade ago with support from the National Science Foundation, it was not clear what impact it would have, Sheikh said.

“Now, we’re able to break through a number of technical barriers primarily as a result of that NSF grant 10 years ago,” he added. “We’re sharing the code, but we’re also sharing all the data captured in the Panoptic Studio.”

Climate change could turn one of Africa’s driest regions into a very wet one by suddenly switching on a Monsoon circulation.

For the first time, scientists find evidence in computer simulations for a possible abrupt change to heavy seasonal rainfall in the Sahel, a region that so far has been characterized by extreme dryness. They detect a self-amplifying mechanism which might kick-in beyond 1.5-2 degrees Celsius of global warming – which happens to be the limit for global temperature rise set in the Paris Climate Agreement. Although crossing this new tipping point is potentially beneficial, the change could be so big, it would be a major adaptation challenge for an already troubled region.

“More rain in a dry region can be good news,” said lead-author Jacob Schewe from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “Climate change due to greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels really has the power to shake things up. It is driving risks for crop yields in many regions and generally increases dangerous weather extremes around the globe, yet in the dry Sahel there seems to be a chance that further warming might indeed enhance water availability for farming and grazing.”

Co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and LDEO of New York’s Columbia University added: “We don’t know what the impacts on the ground will be, this is beyond the scope of our study; but imagine the chance of a greening Sahel. Still, the sheer size of the possible change is mindboggling – this is one of the very few elements in the Earth system that we might witness tipping soon. Once the temperature approaches the threshold, the rainfall regime could shift within just a few years.”

Regions like the central parts of Mali, Niger, and Chad – which are practically part of the Sahara desert – could receive as much rainfall as is today registered in central Nigeria or northern Cameroon which boast a richly vegetated tropical climate.

A new tipping element in the climate system

Dozens of cutting-edge climate computer simulation systems indicate, on average, a weak wet trend for the Sahel under unabated climate change, so it is well known that there’ll likely be some more rain in the region in a warming world. The scientists now took a closer look at those simulations that show the greatest increase, plus 40 to plus 300 percent more rain, while others show only a mild increase or even slight decreases. They find that in these wet simulations, as the surrounding oceans warm, Sahel rainfall increases suddenly and substantially.

During the same time the monsoon winds that blow from the Atlantic ocean to the continental interior get stronger and extend northwards. This is reminiscent of periods in earth’s history during which, according to paleoclimatic findings, African and Asian monsoon systems alternated between wet and dry, sometimes quite abruptly.

The scientists previously identified a self-amplifying mechanism behind the sudden rainfall changes. When the ocean surface temperature increases, more water is evaporated. The moist air drifts onto land, where the water is released. When water vapor turns into rain, heat gets released. This increases the temperature difference between the generally cooler ocean and the warmer landmasses, sucking more moist winds into the continent’s interior. This again will produce more rain, and so on.

“Temperatures have to rise beyond a certain point to start this process,” explained Schewe. “We find that the threshold for this ‘Sahel monsoon’ is remarkably similar across different models. It seems to be a robust finding.”

Huge adaptation challenge for an already troubled region

“The enormous change that we might see would clearly pose a huge adaptation challenge to the Sahel,” said Levermann. “From Mauritania and Mali in the West to Sudan and Eritrea in the East, more than 100 million people are potentially affected that already now are confronted with a multifold of instabilities, including war. Particularly in the transition period between the dry climatic conditions of today and the conceivably much wetter conditions at the end of our century, the Sahel might experience years of hard-to-handle variability between drought and flood. Obviously, agriculture and infrastructure will have to meet this challenge. As great as it hopefully were for the dry Sahel to have so much more rain,” concluded Levermann, “the dimension of the change calls for urgent attention.”

Outreach to Southeast Asian nations by the Trump administration shifts from trade deficits to isolation of North Korea.

By Murray Hiebert*

Many Southeast Asia leaders have expressed anxiety about what Donald Trump’s presidency means for their region. As candidate, he said little about Southeast Asia. All most knew about Trump was his pledge to jettison the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement in which four Southeast nations – Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam – were members and threats to impose 45 percent tariffs on Chinese goods exports to which many Southeast Asian nations contribute through the regional supply chain.

Among the Trump administration’s early acts impacting the region was releasing a list of 16 countries to be targeted for large trade surpluses with the United States, including four from Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Trump issued an executive order calling for a 90-day country-by-country study of these deficits, with results expected any day.

Since then, the Trump administration has signaled it also seeks security cooperation on terrorism and isolation of North Korea.

The Trump administration’s first serious outreach to Southeast Asia began with Vice President Mike Pence’s April 20 visit to Indonesia, part of a larger trip to northeast Asia and Australia. In Jakarta, he visited a mosque and called Indonesia’s moderate brand of Islam an “inspiration” to the rest of the world. He stopped by the ASEAN Secretariat, signaling the administration’s interest in continuing to engage the regional grouping. Pence also announced that Trump would attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam and the East Asia Summit in the Philippines in November.

Afterward, Trump telephoned leaders of the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore to invite them to Washington. In a call with Rodrigo Duterte, Trump urged the Philippine president to cut trade and diplomatic exchanges with North Korea as part of US efforts to force the regime to abandon its nuclear and missile program. Trump praised Duterte for the “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” a reference to a drug war under which roughly 9,000 people have died in extrajudicial killings over the past year.

The next call went to Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who also was urged to cut his country’s economic and diplomatic dealings with North Korea. Thai officials report that Trump lauded Prayuth for efforts in restoring political stability to Thailand since mounting a coup that toppled the democratic government, ending months of disruptive anti-government protests in May 2014.

Part of Trump’s effort, his aides say, is to reengage two longstanding US allies that had been shunned by the previous Obama administration due to human rights and democracy concerns. China had deepened aid to and investment in both Thailand and the Philippines while Washington held them at arm’s length. In addition, by 2015, Thailand and the Philippines emerged as North Korea’s fourth and fifth largest trading partners, respectively, so their cooperation could prove useful in Trump’s efforts to isolate North Korea.

The Thais hope that Prayuth can visit Washington in July, and there is speculation that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong could visit in October. The White House has confirmed neither date. Duterte, anticipating that a visit could trigger huge protests from human rights activists and members of Congress over his drug war, initially said he was too busy. Since mid-May, he has also faced a major security challenge after hundreds of militants allied with Islamic State seized a city in Mindanao, not yet recaptured by the Philippine armed forces.

The first Southeast Asian leader welcomed to the White House was Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Hanoi had been anxious after Trump quickly abandoned the TPP, a 12-nation trade pact under which Vietnam would have been a big beneficiary. In relations with China, the president also focused on restraining North Korea, prompting questions in Vietnam about whether Washington would press China on assertive behavior in the South China Sea.

Hanoi launched a full-court press to engage the new administration by sending repeated delegations to Washington and snaring an early visit for the prime minister. Emphasizing progress in the two countries’ relations, Phuc told Trump that “the relationship between Vietnam and the United States has undergone significant upheavals in history, but today we have been able to become comprehensive partners.”

To deflect attention from Vietnam’s $32 billion trade surplus last year with the United States, the largest among Southeast Asian countries, Vietnamese companies signed roughly $8 billion in commercial deals with US firms during Phuc’s visit. Trump said Phuc, in office for about 15 months, has done a “spectacular job” on trade and other issues.

Less than a week before Phuc arrived, the United States had transferred a decommissioned US Hamilton-class cutter to Vietnam’s Coast Guard. Under the Maritime Strategic Initiative launched by the Obama administration, Washington has also provided patrol boats to Vietnam to help monitor developments in South China Sea.

In a joint communiqué at the end of Phuc’s visit, the two countries agreed that Vietnam would welcome the first visit by a US aircraft carrier to Cam Ranh Bay, a port expanded by Americans during the Vietnam War, and would step up intelligence sharing. Vietnam also expressed interest in acquiring more defense equipment from the United States, possible after former President Barack Obama announced, during a May 2016 visit to Hanoi, that Washington would lift a ban on lethal weapons sales dating back to 1975, the end of the Vietnam War.

Phuc’s agreements in Washington – followed shortly thereafter with a visit to Japan and joint exercises in the South China Sea by the Vietnamese and Japanese coast guards that focused on combating illegal fishing – may have prompted irritation in China, Vietnam’s neighbor to the north.

China and Vietnam had been slated to conduct a joint military patrol along their land border on June 20 to be observed by a senior Chinese general. After talks on territorial issues days prior to the joint patrol, Fan Changlong, vice chair of China’s Central Military Commission, abruptly left for home, explained by China’s Defense Ministry as “related to working arrangements.”

Neither side has explained the general’s sudden departure, but analysts suggest that China abruptly cancelled the joint patrol, which has taken place annually since 2014, to send Hanoi a signal either about its deepening security ties with Washington and Tokyo or as a warning to Vietnam to abandon oil and gas exploration in areas of the South China Sea where the two countries have overlapping claims.

Beijing is known to have been annoyed by Vietnam’s signing with Exxon Mobil an agreement to explore the so-called Blue Whale block off central Vietnam, less than 10 nautical miles from China’s nine-dash line claim in the South China Sea. China has also expressed displeasure over Vietnam’s plans for the Spanish oil company Repsol Exploration to explore another area off the southern coast of Vietnam, near the southern edge of China’s nine-dash line.

Without more details from Hanoi and Beijing, it’s difficult to determine whether this is a blip in often fraught relations between the two communist neighbors. Hanoi is expected to understand China’s signal and adjust to Beijing’s demands – and despite a good start with the Trump administration, Vietnam’s leaders may still harbor doubts about US willingness to stand up to China for the small nations in Southeast Asia.

*Murray Hiebert is deputy director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

By Daniela Vincenti

(EurActiv) — The European Union and Japan agreed the broad lines of a trade deal on Thursday (6 July), promising to iron out the last details within months.

“Today we agreed in principle on an Economic Partnership Agreement, the impact of which goes far beyond our shores,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said during a press conference at the end of the extraordinary EU-Japan Summit.

European Council President Donald Tusk stressed that the deal is not just about trade but about shared values and committing to the highest standards in areas such as labour, safety, environmental and consumer protection.

“Together, we are sending a strong message to the world that we stand for open and fair trade. As far as we are concerned, there is no protection in protectionism. Only by working together will we be able to set ambitious global standards.

“This will be the message that the EU and Japan will bring together to the G20 tomorrow,” Juncker added, referring to the G20 summit about to kick off in Hamburg.

The Commission has insisted that the EU-Japan will be the most important bilateral trade agreement ever concluded by the EU and, as such, will for the first time include a specific commitment to the Paris climate agreement.

The Economic Partnership Agreement will remove the vast majority of duties paid by EU companies, which total an annual €1 billion, as well as opening the Japanese market to key EU agricultural exports and increasing opportunities in a range of sectors.

Big win for rural Europe

EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Phil Hogan said: “This is a win-win for both partners but a big win for rural Europe. The EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement is the most significant and far-reaching agreement ever concluded in agriculture.”

European farmers will now get greater access to Japan’s highly protected dairy market, which will help them deal with a deep crisis, caused by super-low demand and excessive supply.

EU negotiators said the deal scraps duties on many cheeses, such as Gouda and Cheddar (which currently are at 29.8%), and will also allow the bloc to increase its beef exports substantially. On pork there will be duty-free trade in processed meat and almost duty-free trade for fresh meat.

Japan is the EU’s second largest trading partner in Asia and supplying beef to this market at lower tariff rates could potentially make it more attractive to EU-based exporters. Beef exported from the EU is currently subjected to tariffs of around 38.5%.

Tariffs on wine exports, for example, will disappear from day one of entry into force of the deal. For wine producers this means a saving of €134 million a year.

“Equally the Austrian Tiroler Speck, the German Münchener Bier, the Belgian Jambon d’Ardenne, the Polska Wódka as well as over 200 other EU Geographical Indications will now enjoy the same level of protection in Japan that they have in Europe,” Hogan added.

The car trade-off

EU officials said they have also secured results in the auto sector. Japanese car makers will get better access to the EU market. The 10% tariff on Japanese cars exported to the EU will be eliminated in stages within seven years.

In addition, an immediate tariff elimination of between 3% and 4% will be applied on approximately 92% of Japanese auto parts.

Non-tariff measures are also being agreed, including Japanese alignment with international standards, and regulatory cooperation aimed at creating common standards.

At present, South Korean automakers are exporting their cars to the EU on a zero-tariff basis while struggling in the Chinese and US markets.

The agreement also includes a labour and environmental chapter that resembles the one signed by the EU with Canada in CETA. Japan will have to ratify a few core International Labour Organisation conventions to be in compliance with the agreement.

Director-General of BusinessEurope Markus Beyrer said the announcement sent “a very positive signal to the world”.

“We are asking the G20 to take action against protectionism and this is a concrete example of how this could be done,” he added.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani explained that the deepening of the relationship will not just strengthen the EU’s economy by creating jobs and boosting growth.

“Just like with CETA, this agreement sends a clear signal that the European Union is an ambitious negotiator that sets the bar high when it comes to international trade,” he said.

“Europeans want the EU to continue to set rules globally through open and fair trade that delivers a level playing field while protecting our standards. The EU-Japan free trade agreement will do that.”

Sticking points

However, the deal reached today is only a political agreement. A lot remains to be done, especially when it comes to public procurement and investment protection.

Even if Japan has agreed to open up markets at municipal markets, Tokyo needs to convince local prefectures to accept the deal.

On investment protection, the EU and Japan are still far apart with Brussels sticking to the EU’s investment court system, which Japan adamantly opposes, preferring the arbitration process instead.

“Count another extra year – at least – to see the final shape of the agreement,” said Borderlex expert Iana Dreyer.

By Alexandra Wiktorek Sarlo*

(FPRI) — Russian media played a key role in stoking the conflict in Ukraine, sparking fear in the Baltic states that they could become the next target. In the wake of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, Russian state-owned media shaped a nationalistic narrative regarding the annexation of Crimea that spread fear of the new Ukrainian regime and promoted reunification with Russia. Russian media also encouraged the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and spread multiple false news stories intended to portray Ukraine in the most negative light possible.

In the current media environment, it is not possible to eliminate questionable or false sources of information. In the Baltic states, attempts to do so could backfire by reinforcing allegations that the Russian minorities lack full civil rights. However, encouraging independent media and thoughtful integration of Russian-language programming into mainstream sources will provide more credible alternatives for Baltic Russian speakers. In the longer term, an important tool for all countries facing propaganda and “fake news” is to increase education in media literacy, critical reading, and technical training to thwart hacks and other attempts to hijack information. A population trained to identify bias is the best defense against harmful propaganda.

Russian Media in the Baltic states

“Fake news” as well as the strategic use of disinformation for political influence has only recently become central to U.S. politics, but it is a familiar issue in the Baltic states. These three countries constantly face concerns about the influence of Russian media, particularly state-controlled media, on their Russian-speaking minorities. These Kremlin-backed sources present accounts of Russian foreign policy on Ukraine, human rights in Russia, the Russian political system, and attitudes toward Europe and the United States that are at sharp odds with mainstream Baltic and Western perceptions. Some of these sources also emphasize grievances of the local Russian community, such as problems with citizenship acquisition and language choice in schools.

Multiple Russian-language sources exist in each of the Baltic states. A range of Russian television channels is available in various commercial cable packages or through satellite television. Russian newspapers and online news portals with varying degrees of pro-Russian bias are easily available. For example, one of the most popular television stations in Latvia is First Baltic Channel (PBK), which provides local news but also rebroadcasts Russian state television. It has been accused of having ties to pro-Russian political figures.

Online sources—wide and varied— range from Russian-language editions of local Baltic news sources, such as Delfi (available in editions for all three Baltic countries) to online news portals aimed solely at the Russian communities in these countries. Investigative journalists have uncovered concealed links to Russia among Baltic news sources, sparking increased awareness about Russian influence and biases. Notably, a recent investigation into Baltnews, a Russian-language news portal serving all three Baltic states, revealed that though it appears to be locally run, it is actually tied through several levels of ownership to the Russian state media company Rossiya Segodnya. It provides a platform for several openly anti-Western journalists and activists.

Baltic States Countering Russian Disinformation

The main techniques Baltic states have used to counter disinformation from Russian media sources involve fining or suspending channels that display overt biases. For example, Latvia fined PBK three times in 2014 for showing fake or biased broadcasts from Russian news. The radio station Autoradio Rezekne was also fined once. PBK was fined again in 2015. These fines, while highly publicized, were less than $5,000 each, and the fine for the radio station was equivalent to $885. Latvia also temporarily suspended the Russian television station RTR Planeta in 2014 for alleged incitement to war, which violates Latvian media law. Latvia has provided a space for the work of independent Russian news site Meduza, founded by journalists fired from Russian news site Lenta.ru over their coverage of the war in Ukraine. Lithuania has also fought back against Russian disinformation, repeatedly suspending RTR Planeta.

Estonia found itself facing an extremely hostile information environment as early as 2007. At that time, Estonian government institutions, newspapers, banks, and other companies were subjected to weeks of cyber-attacks after the removal of the Bronze Soldier, a Soviet war memorial, from central Tallinn. In 2015, Estonia began broadcasting a new Russian-language channel, ETV+, to provide an alternative for the Russian-speaking population. However, the new station has been hampered by regulations that require live programming to be translated directly into Estonian. It has been more popular with Estonian-speakers than with the Russian-speaking minority, who have access to a wide range of better-resourced channels directly from Russia that are under no such regulation.

International efforts are also targeting Russian disinformation in the Baltics. The NATO Stratcom Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, seeks to strengthen strategic communications within the Alliance, in part by studying Russia’s strategic information campaign in the Baltic and Nordic countries. This effort includes examining how contentious historical events—especially pro-Russian narratives surrounding World War II and the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states—are interpreted in Russian media. It also monitors issues like online robot trolling and devises methods to repel hostile influence. Aside from the Baltic states, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom are all involved in the center.

Assessing Counter-Disinformation Efforts

The success of these initiatives is unclear. Fining and suspending certain channels sends a message, but to what effect? These tactics may play well to majority domestic audiences looking for a tough response. However, to Russian minority populations, such moves may appear to be suppression of information and perspectives that Baltic governments simply don’t like. Such tactics may also appear weak and ineffectual. Moderate fines do not stop channels from operating, and suspensions of individual channels do not stop the flow of information from newspapers, other television and radio stations, or online sources. Moreover, these responses may simply provide fuel for Russian government-backed narratives that portray the Baltic states as obsessed with seeing Russians and Russian culture as a security threat, and with suppressing the Russian language.

Recent studies on combating disinformation show that it is difficult to dislodge false facts and biased narratives. In fact, people are generally quite resistant to attempts to combat their pre-existing notions. For example, one study found that correction of misinformation frequently does not change beliefs. This stems from inherent cognitive biases: people tend to seek information that confirms their views and to see this information as more convincing and trustworthy than information which does not confirm their views. In addition, people remember information better when it matches their preexisting opinions and are highly motivated to rationalize away inconsistencies to maintain their views.

What To Do?

Addressing state-backed misinformation is a long-term struggle and feature of living with a diverse media environment. The proliferation of technology makes it particularly easy to spread false information.

Despite the weaknesses of simply debunking false narratives, providing clear evidence to counter them is still necessary, and helps to show receptive audiences how problematic news stories are constructed and spread. The internet is the source of much fake news proliferation, but it is also a means to combat it. Sites like StopFake use multiple methods to debunk misleading stories relating to the conflict in Ukraine.

The source of this debunking also matters. People are more inclined to accept information that conflicts with their views if it comes from a source they believe to be sympathetic. For Baltic Russian speakers, hearing a greater diversity of perspectives from other Russians could be an important way to break out of an information sphere dominated by Russian state-controlled sources. In the face of enormous resources from Moscow, smaller independent Russian news sources—like Meduza, operating from Latvia—should be encouraged. Likewise, expanding Russian offerings on local state television and radio could make a difference. However, taken by themselves, these options are unlikely to be a complete solution both due to relatively low resources and a likely perception of such sources as a mouthpiece for government interests.

Continued monitoring and study of disinformation techniques by computer scientists, political scholars, security services, and journalists can contribute to a better understanding of how disinformation is created and disseminated, and may spark new techniques for how to counter it. In the face of rapidly advancing technology, knowledge in these areas must constantly be updated and publicized.

Finally, media literacy should become a focus not just in the Baltic states, but anywhere that fake news—or simply a proliferation of information from hard to verify sources online—exists. The importance of critical thinking and critical reading is one aspect of such media literacy, but navigating the current complex media environment requires starting early and taking the skill to a new level.

To preserve the integrity of the information space, efforts should be consolidated around three goals: slow the spread of false news, encourage independent and legitimate reporting, and cultivate awareness and understanding among target populations. No single solution will halt those determined to spread disinformation for their own interests—neither in the Baltic states nor in any other part of the world.

About the author:
*Alexandra Sarlo is a Baltic Sea Fellow in the Eurasia Program at FPRI

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — An EU proposal to impose sanctions on smugglers that bring migrants from Africa was opposed by Russia and China, officials involved in the G20 talks told EURACTIV.

European Council President Donald Tusk circulated on Tuesday (4 July) among G20 members a document to back his proposal to impose UN sanctions on people smugglers.

The idea was discussed by government envoys over the last few days and found “good support”, according to an official involved in the negotiations.

But Russia and China opposed the EU proposal.

Speaking to reporters on Friday (7 June) before the G20 summit started, Tusk said that asset freezes and travel bans were “the very minimum that can be done at the global level” against the smugglers.

“Unfortunately, I have to say that today we do not have the full support even for this minimum. If we do not get it, it will be a sad proof of the hypocrisy of some of the G20 members,” he warned.

“Today it is very difficult to be optimistic,” he added. He asked the leaders to be “more cooperative” and “less cynical” in addressing the issue.

G20 leaders will discuss migration tomorrow.

According to Tusk’s document, and seen by EURACTIV, “the main smuggling routes and the hubs of smuggling activity are well known”.

Around 90% of migrants are sent to Europe from western Libya, especially around the town of Sabratha. Before reaching the coast, migrants are kept and moved along hubs such as Sabha and Kufrah.

The smuggling business generated in Libya €1.6bn in 2016. Part of this money has been used to finance terrorist organisations operating in the country, as links between human traffickers and terrorist groups have been reported.

Besides the sanctions, Tusk also proposed strengthening police and judicial cooperation among the countries in the region, including through Interpol and other law enforcement forums, “to pursue smugglers and traffickers in Libya and the sub-Saharan region”.

He proposed adding a paragraph to the G20 conclusions saying: “We commit to countering migrants smuggling and trafficking in human beings. In this regard we agree to pursue targeted UN sanctions against those involved in smuggling and trafficking in Libya”.

The EU also put special importance on supporting the countries of origin of migrants in order to stem the flow.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recalled the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa set up by the EU last year. According to the Commission figures, the fund has €2.8 billion at its disposal.

In 2017, more than 80,000 people arrived in Italy, most of them were economic migrants. Over 2,000 people died at sea this year, although NGOs and the UN estimate the figure is much higher for those who died crossing the desert trying to reach the Libyan coast.

The high number of arrivals forced the Italian government to request more support from European partners.

My fellow Americans,

Here at the White House, we are dedicating the month of July to three of our favorite words – MADE IN AMERICA. For more than two centuries, those three beautiful words have been the world standard for quality, craftsmanship and excellence – and they still are today.

As President, one of my highest priorities is to restore American Manufacturing. For decades, American jobs have been ripped out of our communities, industries and towns have been stripped bare, and the entire communities have been uprooted and left. Foreign nations got rich at America’s expense – and many special interests profited from this great global theft of American wealth.

Since taking the oath of office, our government has adopted a new philosophy: AMERICA FIRST – and believe me, it’s about time. The era of economic surrender is over – and a new national pride is sweeping across our land. You see it, I see it, we all see it.

Industry confidence has soared to the highest level ever recorded.

One of my first acts was ordering all federal agencies to enforce two simple rules: Buy American, and Hire American. We want to build with American Workers, and with American Iron, Aluminum and Steel.

We are also tearing down every possible barrier to domestic energy production to unleash the full power of our economy. The American people will finally be allowed to tap into the vast energy wealth sitting right beneath our feet or right below our shores.

We have also sent a clear message to the world that we will not allow other nations to take advantage of us any longer.

That’s why I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord – and believe me, it was one-sided. Not a good deal for our country. And the job-killing Trans Pacific Partnership, and that’s why we are pursuing a total renegotiation of NAFTA and if we don’t get it, we will terminate – that is end NAFTA forever.

Every other nation on earth protects its own interests. America is finally going to do the same.

And as we continue to fight for American workers and industry, it won’t be long before we see the Made in America label proudly displayed on thousands of new products all across this great land and exported all around the world.

Thank you, God bless you, God bless America. We are all doing a job, we are working very hard. It will be America First. It will be Make America Great Again. It’s happening.

President Donald J. Trump, President Moon Jae-in, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met in Hamburg, Germany, on July 6 to discuss the serious and escalating threat posed by the nuclear and ballistic missile programs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

According to a White House statement released Friday, the three leaders condemned the DPRK’s unprecedented launch, on July 4, of a ballistic missile with intercontinental range, a major escalation that directly violates multiple United Nation’s Security Council (UNSC) resolutions and that clearly demonstrates the growing threat the DPRK poses to the United States, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and Japan, as well as other countries around the world.

The leaders affirmed the importance of working together to counter the DPRK threat and to achieve the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner, a shared goal among the three countries. They also committed to continue to cooperate to apply maximum pressure on the DPRK to change its path, refrain from provocative and threatening actions, and take steps necessary to return to serious denuclearization dialogue.

The three leaders emphasized that they, together with the rest of the international community, stand ready to offer a brighter future for the DPRK if it chooses the right path. The United States, the ROK, and Japan will never accept a nuclear armed DPRK, the White House said.

President Trump, President Moon, and Prime Minister Abe decided to press for the early adoption of a new UNSC resolution with additional sanctions to demonstrate to the DPRK that there are serious consequences for its destabilizing, provocative, and escalatory actions. They called on the international community to swiftly and fully implement all UNSC resolutions and to take measures to reduce economic relations with the DPRK. The three leaders also called on the nations that border the DPRK to make further efforts to convince the DPRK regime to abandon its current threatening and provocative path and immediately take steps to denuclearize and to halt its ballistic missile program.

The three leaders underscored their commitment to further strengthen their respective alliances and to ensure they continue to increase their capabilities to deter and respond to any attack from the DPRK. They committed to continue advancing trilateral security cooperation in the face of the threat posed by the DPRK. President Trump reaffirmed the ironclad commitment of the United States to defend the ROK and Japan using the full range of its conventional and nuclear capabilities.

If you’re worried that one day the robots will revolt and either exterminate or subjugate the entire human race, you’re not alone. But instead of sitting back and waiting for the robot rebellion, two leaders in AI are teaming up to tackle the problem of creating smart computer programs that won’t eventually try and take over, Engadget said.

Google DeepMind and Open AI, a lab partially funded by Elon Musk, released a research article outlining a new method of machine learning. It actually takes its cues from humans when it comes to learning new tasks. This could be safer than allowing an AI to figure out how to solve a problem on its own, which has the potential to introduce unwelcome surprises.

The main problem that the research tackled was when an AI discovers the most efficient way to achieve maximum rewards is to cheat — the equivalent of shoving everything on the floor of your room into a closet and declaring it “clean.” Technically, the room itself is clean, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen. Machines are able to find these workarounds and exploit them in any given problem.

The issue is with the reward system, and that’s where the two groups focused their efforts. Rather than crafting an overly complex reward system that machines can cut through, the teams used human input to reward the AI. When the AI solved a problem the way trainers wanted to, it got positive feedback. Using this method, the AI was able to learn play simple video games.

While this is an encouraging breakthrough, it’s not widely applicable: This type of human feedback is much too time consuming. But through collaborations like this, it’s possible that we can control and direct the development of AI and prevent machines from eventually becoming smart enough to destroy us all.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis spoke by telephone Thursday with Qatari Minister of State for Defense Affairs Dr. Khalid al-Attiyah to discuss the security partnership between the United States and Qatar, Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W. White said in a statement.

The secretary and the minister affirmed the two nations’ strategic security partnership and discussed mutual security interests, including the current status of operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, White said.

Mattis emphasized the importance of Qatar’s contributions to the defeat-ISIS coalition, in particular the recent Qatari contribution of C-17 cargo aircraft to the campaign, White said.

The secretary, she added, also discussed the state of relations among the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the importance of de-escalating tensions so all partners in the Gulf region can focus on the next steps in meeting common goals.
Mattis and al-Attiyah affirmed their commitment to continued U.S.-Qatar cooperation and deepening their strategic partnership, White said.

By Fouzia Khan

Organizers of this year’s Jeddah Summer Festival, which opens on July 9 and continues for a month, expect more than 1 million visitors.

The opening of the festival will take place at Jungle Land Theme Park in Marsal Village on Al-Haramain Road.

Mazen bin Mohammed Batterjee, vice president of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI), said that 50,000 visitors are expected per day.

He said this year, there is a new version of the festival, which is the largest tourism and marketing annual event in Jeddah in conjunction with the summer holidays.

Tourism is an important pillar that contributes to diversifying sources of income and enhances Jeddah’s status on the tourist map, both locally and regionally, he explained.

The festival will include tourism, entertainment, cultural programs, competitions, sports, visual shows, plays for children and families, folkloric shows and dance, a Chinese circus and cultural plays organized by the Saudi Arabian Society for Culture and Arts (SASCA) at their premises.

Hassan bin Ibrahim Dahlan, the secretary-general of the JCCI, said this year the festival will bring hundreds of major activities and will gives away thousands of gifts in addition to the shopping experience. Prizes will amount to SR2 million ($533,305), including four luxury cars.

By Sharif Nashashibi *

Last month’s visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah by Donald Trump’s son-in law Jared Kushner was a somewhat low-key affair that received relatively little media coverage. This is not necessarily what one might have expected from the new peace broker’s first foray into the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire.

But that was no bad thing for the otherwise attention-craving US president, because Kushner came and went empty-handed — hardly a promising start to Trump’s stated desire to reach the “ultimate deal.”

The aspect of the visit that arguably garnered the most media attention was Kushner’s meeting with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, which reportedly did not go well at all. Reflecting the media’s general assessment of the meeting, the Times of Israel said Abbas was left “enraged” and “fuming.”

But it was clear even before Kushner’s arrival that there would be no progress. The day before he landed in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the start of construction of a new Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, part of a colonial expansion that has picked up considerable pace since Trump took office.

Indeed, in March The Guardian reported that “Israel has indicated it will pursue a unilateral policy of largely unconstrained settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.” Israel is openly emboldened by a US president who has said “there’s nobody more pro-Israeli than I am.”

And the White House has said he does not see settlements — which are illegal under international law and violate a number of UN Security Council resolutions, the most recent one passed in December 2016 — as an “impediment to peace.”

Israeli announcements of settlement expansion just prior to or during visits by US envoys is nothing new. But whereas during the Obama administrations this was done as a slap in the face of a president who clashed with Netanyahu over the issue, it is a very different case with Kushner.

His family’s charitable foundation, of which he is a director, has made donations to West Bank settlements. As such, the man tasked with forging Israeli-Palestinian peace may have no ideological objection to one of its biggest obstacles.

At the meeting with Abbas, Kushner and Trump’s international negotiator Jason Greenblatt “sounded like Netanyahu’s advisers and not as honest mediators,” a Palestinian source told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. It boggles the mind that Palestinian officials still hold out hope that any US administration can act as an honest broker.

Whether Democrat or Republican, for decades American politicians — including presidential candidates — have fallen over themselves to court the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US by professing their unflinching support for Israel, whose interests are prioritized above all others in the Middle East. This pledge of allegiance is practically a rite of passage, one that is faithfully implemented when in office (even Barack Obama was no exception to this time-honored tradition).

But unlike previous US administrations, Kushner’s task is hampered by the number of other major — and disparate — government jobs Trump has given him, as if Israeli-Palestinian peace was not elusive and difficult enough.

Kushner’s other roles include being the primary point of contact with more than two-dozen countries, and as US news channel ABC reported, reforming the criminal justice system and veteran care; running the Office of American Innovation; tackling the opioid epidemic; and the small matter of “revamping the entire federal government.”

As news satirist John Oliver put it: “Jared’s portfolio would be unmanageable for the smartest man on Earth.” It certainly raises questions as to how much — or indeed how little — of a priority resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to Trump, when it seems like a mere side-job for Kushner.

Moreover, current regional and domestic circumstances are only galvanizing Israel’s trademark intransigence toward the Palestinians. Much of the Middle East is in turmoil; attention and concern are focused on Iran’s expanding regional footprint; years-long tensions between the two main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, are escalating; and the PA’s shameful security coordination with Israel has left it essentially managing the occupation of its own people.

As a result of all this, Israel — whose society and polity have shifted decidedly to the right — has no incentive to engage diplomatically in any meaningful way. Palestine used to be the issue in the Middle East. Now it is one of many. That is a gift not just to Israel but also to the Trump administration, because it means its inevitable failure to clinch the “ultimate deal” may slip largely under the radar.

• Sharif Nashashibi is an award-winning journalist and commentator on Arab affairs.

IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way’s galactic disk, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust. In order for astronomers to see the intricate spiral structure of IC 342, they must gaze through a large amount of material contained within our own galaxy — no easy feat!

As a result IC 342 is relatively difficult to spot and image, giving rise to its intriguing nickname: the “Hidden Galaxy.”

Located very close (in astronomical terms) to the Milky Way, this sweeping spiral galaxy would be among the brightest in the sky were it not for its dust-obscured location. The galaxy is very active, as indicated by the range of colors visible in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, depicting the very central region of the galaxy.

A beautiful mixture of hot, blue star-forming regions, redder, cooler regions of gas, and dark lanes of opaque dust can be seen, all swirling together around a bright core. In 2003, astronomers confirmed this core to be a specific type of central region known as an HII nucleus — a name that indicates the presence of ionized hydrogen — that is likely to be creating many hot new stars.

By Admir Muslimovic and Filip Rudic

Twelve Bosnian Serbs convicted of genocide have served their sentences and been released – some have returned to live in places where the massacres happened, while others continue to deny that Srebrenica was genocide.

When the 22nd anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres is commemorated on Tuesday, 12 people who were convicted of responsibility for genocide will not be spending the day in prison cells.

Having served their sentences and been released, most of them are now retired and live in either Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia – some of them in places where the massacres took place in July 1995, and where survivors and victims’ families are able to see them walking freely in the streets.

Vinko Pandurevic, Ljubomir Borovcanin, Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Jokic have all completed the jail terms they were given by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Pandurevic, a former Bosnian Serb Army officer, was sentenced to 13 years for committing crimes in Srebrenica. Following his early release in 2015, he now lives in Belgrade with his wife and sons.

Pandurevic told BIRN that the Hague Tribunal’s verdict made it impossible for him to get a job as a university lecturer.

“Some faculties are reluctant to accept people with my background; they are afraid that an NGO or a journalist might say that someone with my ‘burden’ is unfit to teach students,” he said.

Other than that, he and his family have had no problems in Serbia as a result of his conviction, he added.

Pandurevic is currently active in the Club of Serbian Generals and Admirals and the Oath to the Fatherland Association, which brings together people from the Republika Srpska area of Bosnia and the former Republic of Serbian Krajina wartime statelet in Croatia who now live in Serbia.

Since his release, Pandurevic has also published several books on politics and the Bosnian war, and has now written a new book about his experience as a inmate at the Hague Tribunal’s detention unit, which is currently being reviewed before publication.

Despite his conviction, Pandurevic denies that Srebrenica was an act of genocide.

He also believes that the war in former Yugoslavia was inevitable, and that the outcome could not have been significantly different.

When asked if he would do anything differently with the benefit of hindsight, Pandurevic responded that he believes that his actions during the war were correct.

“The way I saw my duties, and the stance I took towards the enemy and our own forces, was right, in my judgment,” he said.

Meanwhile Ljubomir Borovcanin, the former deputy commander of the Bosnian Serb interior ministry’s Special Brigade, was sentenced to 17 years in prison and released from jail in Denmark in August last year.

He is now retired and lives in Bijeljina in Bosnia with his wife and sons, and writes political and security analyses for the online journal of the Russia-based Strategic Culture Foundation, which has an outlet in Serbia.

Vidoje Blagojevic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Bratunac Brigade, was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served his sentence in Norway.

He now lives in a rented apartment in Banja Luka in Bosnia and is a military pensioner.

Dragan Jokic, the former head of the engineering section of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Zvornik Brigade, was sentenced to nine years in jail and served his sentence in Austria.

He and his family currently live in Zvornik and is also military pensioner, receiving benefits for a retired officer of the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

New names

The identities of three of the freed Hague Tribunal convicts have been changed in order to protect them after their release.

One of them, former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Drazen Erdemovic, admitted that he participated in the shooting of 1,000 and 1,200 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in Branjevo in July 1995. The shooting went on for six hours, he said.

Erdemovic finished serving his five-year sentence 17 years ago and now lives in Europe; he has also appeared as a defence witness at the trial of former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic.

Momir Nikolic, the former assistant commander for security and intelligence affairs of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Bratunac Brigade, is the only one who has admitted involvement in the operation to organise the systematic killing of more than 7,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica and the deportation of women and children.

Three years ago, he was released from prison in Finland, where he served his 20-year sentence, and his identity was partially changed so that when he is living outside Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia, he uses a different name.

Nikolic is retired. He frequently visits his mother at their family house in Bratunac, where he was born. He is currently writing two books, one of which focuses on military operations in the Srebrenica area, while the other one is about the political aspects of the fall of Yugoslavia.

Besides their homes in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, he and his family also have a residence in Sweden.

Nikolic is just one of many perpetrators who survivors of the massacres and relatives of the Bosniaks from Srebrenica who were killed can see in the places where the killings took place.

“I meet the criminals in Srebrenica all the time,” the president of the Mothers of Srebrenica association, Hajra Catic, told BIRN.

“Around 400 people who participated in the genocide in one way or another are currently employed in police structures and state institutions. We have lists of those people. Some are even university professors,” Catic claimed. “Victims cannot be satisfied with such things. They will never stop caring.”

Meanwhile Dragan Obrenovic’s identity was also changed after the Hague Tribunal offered him protection after his release. The former chief of headquarters and deputy commander of the First Zvornic Infantry Brigade with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Drina Corps was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

After doing his jail time in Norway, he continues to live abroad with his family.

Back to Bratunac

Five Srebrenica convicts who were jailed by the Bosnian state court – Milivoje Cirkovic, Zoran Kusic, Vaso Todorovic, Marko Boskic and Mladen Blagojevic – have also been released after completing their time in jail.

Cirkovic, who worked at the Bosnian Serb interior ministry’s Jahorina Training Centre during the war, returned to his homeland, Serbia, after agreeing a plea bargain and serving his five-year sentence. He now works as a craftsman at his family estate.

Kusic, who also served at the Jahorina Training Centre, was sentenced to five years in prison too. BIRN has not been able to establish his current whereabouts or occupation.

Boskic, a former member of the 10th Reconnaissance Squad of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Main Headquarters, was jailed for ten years.

He has now served his sentence, but BIRN has not been able to get any information about his place of residence or occupation either.

Todorovic, a former member of the Sekovici Special Police Squad who was sentenced to six years after signing a guilt admission agreement, now lives in the Bratunac area.

After having served his seven-year sentence, Blagojevic, a former military policeman with the Bosnian Serb Army’s Bratunac Brigade, returned to the United States, from where he had been extradited to Bosnia and Herzegovina for having given false data to the US authorities about his role in the Bosnian Serb military during the war.

The victims’ view

The issue of Srebrenica convicts returning to the places where their crimes were committed has caused disquiet among Bosniak victims’ organisations.

Mediha Smajic, a journalist from Srebrenica, thinks that the return of released war-crimes convicts to the Srebrenica, Zvornik and Bratunac areas, where the massacres took place in 1995, reopens old wounds.

“Their presence in the places where they committed crimes causes harm to victims and [post-war] returnees, who they meet on a daily basis,” she argued.

The acceptance of the convicts by local Serb communities is also a source of unease, she added.

“People must live together, but who belongs where should be defined. I am saying this for the sake of future generations, who should lead normal lives,” she said.

Bosnian sociologist Ivan Sijakovic pointed out however that “the victims feel uncomfortable, but there is nothing we can do about it” because there are no legal restrictions on convicted war criminals’ reintegration into society.

Moral issues aside, Sijakovic explained, there is nothing to prevent convicts who have been released from returning to live near the scene of their crimes.

“From the legal point of view, after serving their sentences, people can live wherever they want,” he said.

By Haley Wiebel*

Ranked as one of the ten most mega-diverse countries in the world, Peru has used its biodiversity as a tool to attract both foreign and domestic visitors. This has engendered a flourishing ecotourism sector, which has become largely dependent on the Andean nation’s protected area system. Ecotourism interweaves aspects of environmental conservation, economic development, and cultural preservation. In practice, it can include educating visitors about biodiversity, raising cultural awareness, and generating financial benefits for nearby communities and conservation efforts.^[i] Peru’s protected area system supports the fundamentals of ecotourism and has become a vehicle for the sector’s increased growth. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), protected areas are legally designated spaces that enable long-term environmental conservation.^[ii] These areas are intended to serve a dual-purpose of allowing indigenous populations to protect their ancestral territories from outside threats, while providing them with an added source of income. Although Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary remains the most iconic protected area in the country, sites such as Paracas National Park, Huascaran National Park, and the Tambopata National Reserve are becoming increasingly well-known travel destinations as well.^[iii] As a result, Peru’s protected area system contributes to a sustainable form of development, which has significant economic implications for the country.

Peru’s Protected Area System

Over the past 5 decades, Peru has established over 70 protected areas.^[iv] While the system is now overseen by the Peruvian Ministry of Environment, this has not always been the case. Peru’s protected area system was managed by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture until the National Service for Natural Protected Areas was created in 2008.^[v] The legal framework of Peru’s protected area system allows land to be managed on a national, regional, private, or communal level. However, all must go through a detailed certification process to receive official status, as explained by Andes Amazon Fund Program Director and former National Protected Area Service of Peru (SERNANP) board member, Enrique Ortiz:

A number of procedures and requirements are needed to declare an area, including consulta previa [prior consultation], if there are indigenous communities living nearby. Those holding land rights in the area must also be notified of the intention to create a protected area. The proposal then passes from SERNANP to the Ministry of Environment for approval, and ultimately to the council of Ministers for its final declaration.^[vi]

Lands protected on a national level have either direct or indirect land use status; other types of protected areas typically permit direct use. While direct use areas allow the extraction of resources under the guidelines of specific management plans, indirect use areas are much stricter: “Non-extractive scientific research, recreation and tourism activities are allowed in appropriately designated and managed zones. [In those indirect use protected areas,] extraction of natural resources and modification or conversion of natural habitats is not permitted. Areas of indirect use [include] national parks, national sanctuaries, and historical sanctuaries.”^[vii] Established in 2015 by the Ollanta Humala administration, Sierra del Divisor is the country’s newest national park. Referred to as one of “South America’s wildest landscapes,” the park spans 3.3 million acres (1.3 million hectares) and is emblematic of the ecological and cultural significance of protected areas.^[viii] In addition to over 550 species of birds, 120 mammals, and 80 amphibians, several indigenous communities, some of which are uncontacted, call Sierra del Divisor their home.^[ix] However, the park’s legal status does not entirely safeguard it from illicit activities. Like many protected areas, Sierra del Divisor faces illegal mining, logging, and coca cultivation within its borders. A study conducted by the World Bank highlighted the role of effective enforcement mechanisms in protected area management: “Improved resources and capacity for patrolling and enforcement [proved] critical in increasing conservation effectiveness. Patrols by park guards and local community groups, and even the presence of tourist guides, helped reduce illegal activities inside the protected area.”^[x] Therefore, ecotourism can be used as a multipurpose tool to preserve the environmental integrity of protected areas, allowing for continued visitors.

 The Economic Impact of Ecotourism in Peru

As one of the fastest growing sectors in Peru, tourism has become a vital part of the country’s economy.^[xi] Peru’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) serves as a measurable indicator of its impact; in 2014, travel and tourism contributed to 9.7% of the country’s GDP and is predicted to increase to 11.1% by 2025.^[xii] In comparison, mining – one of the country’s most robust  industries – accounted for approximately 14% of Peru’s GDP in 2016.^[xiii] Today, Peru receives around 3.5 million tourists a year, and a significant portion of those visit protected areas. SERNANP predicts that 2 million domestic and international tourists will visit the country’s protected areas in 2017.^[xiv] Since 2009, the number of travelers who have visited Peru’s protected areas has grown 17 percent annually.^[xv] This has produced a significant increase in revenue. Between 2011 and 2015, the amount of money earned from protected area entry tickets rose from approximately $2.5 million USD to $4.2 million USD.^[xvi] However, indirect revenue is also earned from the purchase of lodging, food, and other goods and services outside of the protected areas. The multiplier effect of ecotourism not only benefits the national economy, but also aids local communities: “In 2013, the 1.3 million tourists who visited the country’s protected areas generated $236 million in revenue, of which $134 million directly benefited people. For example, nearly 13,000 people worked at restaurants and lodges that cater to tourists.”^[xvii] Ecotourism provides local communities with an opportunity to diversify economically and offers an alternative to illegal, extractive industries. As a result, it gives local populations an added incentive to support environmental conservation: “ ‘Protected areas can help local economies by attracting tourists who spend money in nearby communities, by protecting ecosystem services (such as water provision, flood protection, generation of non-timber forest products) which increase productivity, or through improved infrastructure and institutional development.’ ”^[xviii] A study published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management confirmed this evidence. It examined conservation efforts in Costa Rica and Thailand, which have successfully created protected area systems that focus on ecotourism: “[The study showed] that, at least in Thailand and Costa Rica, protected areas actually boost local economies and decrease poverty […] Researchers found that in fact living near a protected area was on average a benefit: in Thailand poverty headcount dropped by 8 percent and in Costa Rica poverty was reduced by 10 percent.”^[xix] Therefore, Peru’s protected area system can help lessen poverty in local communities if properly implemented, aiding the country’s future development.

Integrating Environmental Conservation and Tourism Under President Kuczynski’s Administration

Environmental conservation is a key component of sustained tourism growth in Peru. Still, defending the natural environment requires a strong commitment from the national government. Elected in 2016, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski vowed to fight deforestation earlier this year, explaining a few of the government’s initiatives: “We’re completely committed to reducing deforestation in the Amazon […] We signed an agreement in the previous government and you get carbon credits for every acre that is reforested or not deforested. In addition to that, the government has a program called Blue Sierra, Sierra Azul, to [reforest] the Western edge of the Andes.”^[xx] These are all promising first steps. However, in order to secure the economic benefits of ecotourism, Peru’s protected area system must be integrated into this strategy. The maintenance of current protected areas and creation of additional ones will likely boost tourism revenue based on current rates. While the Kuczynski administration has yet to establish any national protected areas, several are waiting for government approval, according to Ortiz: “Tres Cañones in Cuzco, Pacifico Tropical in Piura, and Vista Allegre Omia in Amazonas are at the top of the list. Once Yaguas and Ausangate go through consulta previa, they will be ready for government approval as well.”^[xxi] The proposed Regional Conservation Area of Tres Cañones, in particular, would have significant economic benefits for Peru. Approximately 5 hours from Machu Picchu, Tres Cañones would attract some of the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s 1 million annual visitors to the southern part of the country.^[xxii] This could help alleviate some of the strain felt by Machu Picchu; the Inca site has reached its maximum carrying capacity in recent years, which threatens its preservation and role as a source of revenue. According to Ortiz, tourism in Tres Cañones would ultimately create more jobs and promote economic diversity in the province of Espinar, an area largely dominated by mining interests; the region would see an increased demand for hotels, restaurants, and local businesses as well as jobs such as travel guides and interpreters.^[xxiii] Tres Cañones, therefore, is emblematic of the economic potential of Peru’s protected area system.

The Future of Ecotourism in Peru

Peru’s protected area system challenges the idea that economic growth and environmental conservation are mutually exclusive. Still, some would argue that a balance must be found between these two factors to ensure that human impact does not degrade the source of Peru’s sustainable income. If this is achieved, rural and indigenous communities would be among those with the most to gain from increased ecotourism, especially in protected areas. Quality of life could be improved without having to sacrifice local lands or cultures. In this sense, Peru’s protected area system can be both an engine for economic growth, and a way to preserve the country’s national patrimony and identity as one of the most diverse nations on Earth.

*Haley Wiebel, Extramural Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Additional editorial support provided by Steven Hirsch, Senior Research Fellow, Emma Tyrou, Research Fellow, Taylor Lewis, Extramural Contributor, and Blake Burdge, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

^[i] The Nature Conservancy. “Eco-Trips and Travel.” What Is Ecotourism?. Accessed June 22, 2017. https://www.nature.org/greenliving/what-is-ecotourism.xml.

^[ii]  “Protected Areas .” IUCN. Accessed June 22, 2017. https://www.iucn.org/theme/protected-areas/about.

^[iii] “Peru’s natural protected areas to welcome over 2 million tourists in 2017.” February 14, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2017. http://www.andina.com.pe/Ingles/noticia-perus-natural-protected-areas-to-welcome-over-2-million-tourists-in-2017-653876.aspx.

^[iv] SERNANP. “¿Qué es un ANP?” Accessed May 30, 2017. http://www.sernanp.gob.pe/ques-es-un-anp.

^[v] Solano, Pedro. Legal Framework for Protected Areas: Peru. Publication. June 2009. Accessed May 6, 2017. http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/peru_en.pdf.

^[vi] Ortiz, Enrique. Interview by author. May 15, 2017.

^[vii] Solano, Pedro. Legal Framework for Protected Areas: Peru. Publication. June 2009. Accessed May 6, 2017. http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/peru_en.pdf.

^[viii] Butler, Rhett A. “Peru creates ‘Yellowstone of the Amazon: 3.3M acre reserve home to uncontacted tribes, endangered wildlife.” Conservation news. December 19, 2015. Accessed May 30, 2017. https://news.mongabay.com/2015/11/peru-creates-yellowstone-of-the-amazon/.

^[ix] “Sierra del Divisor Media Fact Sheet.” Rainforest Trust. Accessed June 27, 2017. https://www.rainforesttrust.org/sdd-media-fact-sheet/.

^[x] Alers, Marcel, Andrew Bovarnick, Tim Boyle, Kathy Mackinnon, and Claudia Sobrevila. Reducing Threats to Protected Areas: Lessons from the Field. Publication. 2007. Accessed May 7, 2017. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTBIODIVERSITY/Resources/ReducingThreats-web.pdf.

^[xi] Peru Explorer. “Peru Tourism Statistics.” 2018. Accessed May 30, 2017. http://www.peru-explorer.com/peru_tourism_statistics.htm.

^[xii] World Tourism and Travel Council. Travel & Tourism: Economic Impact 2015 Peru. Report. 2015. Accessed May 30, 2017. https://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/…/countries%202015/peru2015.pdf.

^[xiii] Bessombes, Carlos. “La minería salvó una vez más al PBI, que creció 6,39 % en diciembre.” February 20, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2017. http://larepublica.pe/impresa/economia/742 603-la-mineria-sal vo-una-vez-mas-al-pbi-que-crecio-639-en-diciembre.

^[xiv] “Peru’s natural protected areas to welcome over 2 million tourists in 2017.” February 14, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2017. http://www.andina.com.pe/Ingles/noticia-perus-natural-protecte d-ar eas-to-welcome-over-2-million-tourists-in-2017-653876.aspx.

^[xv] Ibid.

^[xvi] Ministerio del Ambiente del Perú. Áreas Naturales Protegidas del Perú. Report. 2015. Accessed May 12, 2017. http://www.minam.gob.pe/informessectoriales/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2016/02/ANP080616.pdf

^[xvii] World Wildlife Fund. National Parks: Peru’s Natural Legacy. Report.

^[xviii] Hance, Jeremy. “Environment Versus Economy: Local Communities Find Economic Benefits from Living Next to Conservation Areas.” June 12, 2011. Accessed July 06, 2017. https://news.mongabay.com/2011/06/environment-versus-economy-local-communities-find-economic-benefits-from-living-next-to-conservation-areas/.

^[xix] Ibid.

^[xx] YouTube. March 10, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l- toTsXDgvg&t=12s.

^[xxi] Ortiz, Enrique. Interview by author. May 15, 2017.

^[xxii] Ibid.

^[xxiii] Ibid.

Power transition is the standard explanation for current US-China tensions. But another – more fundamental – transition remains unaddressed.

By Rajesh Basrur*

Last week the US Navy’s guided-missile destroyer, the USS Stethem, sailed to within 12 nautical miles of Triton Island in the China-controlled Paracel Islands, inviting Beijing’s condemnation of American “provocation”. Such incidents are by no means new. In December 2013, a confrontation between Chinese vessels accompanying the carrier Liaoning and the American cruiser Cowpens brought them perilously close to a collision in the South China Sea.

In December 2016, a Chinese naval ship seized an American undersea drone even as the USS Bowditch, a naval oceanographic vessel, was in the process of recovering it some 50 nautical miles off Subic Bay in the Philippines. The drone was returned, but incidents of the kind have become more frequent since then and raised the strategic temperature between the United States and China. In mid-May this year, Chinese Su30 aircraft intercepted an American WC-135 Constant Phoenix radiation detection aircraft over the East China Sea. A week later, two Chinese fighters intercepted a US P3-Orion surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea.

Power Transition or More?

If the repeated low-level strategic face-offs seem familiar, it is because they follow a pattern characteristic of the Cold War era: frictions over geopolitical space, hostile rhetoric, periodic gamesmanship, and the looming shadow of crisis. An additional dimension to the growing tension – absent during the Cold War – is the increasing economic tension between the two big players, especially with China’s economy having outpaced that of the US: China’s gross domestic product (GDP) in purchasing power parity terms stood at US$21.14 trillion in 2016 as compared to the US figure of US$18.56 trillion. Are these symptoms of a new cold war in the making, as some influential commentators warn?

To be sure, there is a sense of “power transition” occurring with the rise of China, but, something more is happening. Even as strategic frictions have grown, the US-China relationship has become enmeshed in a web of economic exchange. Both countries are increasingly dependent on trade. Trade as a percentage of GDP was just 9% in 1960 for both; by 2015, it was a substantial 28% for the United States and as much as 40% for China. For both, the other is a major trading partner: according to International Monetary Fund data, US trade with China in 2016 constituted 15.9% of its total trade; likewise, China’s trade with the US was 14% of its total trade.

Similarly, notwithstanding strategic tensions, US Trade Representative (USTR) data show US services exports to China touched US$53.5 billion in 2016, a rise of 353% from 2001. Likewise, US services imports from China rose by 350% in the same years, reaching US$ 16 billion last year. Even more dramatic are the figures for foreign direct investment (FDI): the USTR reports that American FDI in China in 2015 stood at US$74.6 billion, a growth of 10.5% from 2014, when tensions in the South and East China Seas were clearly intensifying; while Chinese FDI in the US during the same time frame skyrocketed, touching US$14.8 billion – a growth of as much as 50.6%.

Competitive Strategic Politics

In short, despite frictions over the seas and over wider issues such as American concerns over China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy in the Western Pacific and Chinese objections to the US building of a missile defence system in East Asia, a more fundamental transition has been occurring. With rising economic interdependence, the incentive to fight has receded sharply for both the “hegemon” and the “challenger”.

If that were not enough, any thought of serious armed conflict is ruled out by the far more intense interdependence created by nuclear weapons. True, the US has a much larger arsenal, but the distribution of nuclear weapons capacity has never meant much, which is why the US has not – and will not – come close to attempting a surgical strike on North Korea’s fledgling capabilities. Yet, each incident of confrontation feeds on the next and, over time, the risk of unanticipated catastrophe grows.

That interdependence sharply constrains policy choices is not a lesson easily learned. Despite the stark lessons of the Berlin and Cuban crises in 1961 and 1962 and the desire never to go to war in a nuclear world, Washington and Moscow continued to build superfluous arsenals, reaching the astronomical total of 61,682 nuclear warheads in 1986 toward the end of the Cold War era. Nuclear rivals throughout the last seven decades have engaged in confrontation before reverting to some sort of uncertain stability.

The current confrontations between Washington and Beijing represent a well-established pattern of competitive strategic politics despite the interdependence of the players. On the military side, we see a growing maritime contest in the Western Pacific, competing military capabilities, with conventional and nuclear modernisations proceeding apace, and regular incidents of (thus far limited) brinkmanship.

On the economic side, the litany of complaints about trade imbalances, protectionism and currency manipulation – much the same as we saw four decades ago when Japan threatened American economic dominance – aggravates the strategic tensions between the big two today. As a result, the United States and China drift uneasily over an increasingly turbulent sea without a clear chart for stability. Neither wants war, but uncontrolled aggravation of tensions remains an ever-present possibility.

Lessons Unlearned

Why do the lessons of the past – that trade wars and nuclear wars are not viable options – remain poorly learned? Two reasons come to mind. First, there is the problem of strategic habit: the kind of thinking typical of an anarchic, “self-help system” – where power and self-interest are prioritised – continues even as the world changes profoundly. The real “Thucydides trap” is to persist in thinking as that great historian did in a world that has fundamentally changed.

Second, policymakers simultaneously address audiences that seem to require more of the same: adversaries who must be shown resolve; allies looking for assurance; and domestic publics needing to be convinced that their loyalty to leaders must remain unshaken. Perhaps too, leaders themselves need constantly to boost self-images troubled by uncertainty.

The inevitable outcome is a preference for competitive policies and their manifestation in the kind of risk-taking we see today, with the attendant prospect of sliding down a slippery slope to conflict. Can Washington and Beijing come to terms? If history is any guide, not easily. Well-meaning policy recommendations are in themselves unlikely to bring the required wisdom. It will take a serious economic or military crisis for them to come together to avert impending disaster.

*Rajesh Basrur is Professor of International Relations in the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The recent phenomenon of ‘cow vigilantism’ poses a serious threat to the political legitimacy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His dilemma lies in balancing his image as a strong Hindu leader with his popularity as moderniser and reformer. The inability to find a balance that disavows violence threatens to leave behind a legacy of religious extremism.

By Juhi Ahuja and Pravin Prakash*

In many parts of India, the majority Hindu population considers the cow sacred. However, violent acts against humans in the name of ‘cow protection’ are a worrying indication of the current administration’s failure to reign in extremist Hindu groups. Narendra Modi’s ascension to the premiership was propelled by the support of the Sangh Parivar – the family of Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) organisations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), where he earned his stripes as a grassroots organiser.

However, a large section of his support base also comprised the urbanised middle-class, who elected him for his commitment to economic development. This middle class largely disavows the use of violence and sees it as antithetical to economic development.

Modi’s Conundrum

The Modi conundrum is thus as follows: If he allows for religious extremism and violence, he might lose the support of the growing middle-class. Yet if he is perceived to be too harsh on the Sangh groups — some of which allegedly instigate cow vigilantism — then he risks losing his other major support base. Modi is thus forced to strike a balance between his two major support bases while taking serious action against violence in the name of religion.

Arguably, there has been a correlation between the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) national victory in 2014 and the emboldening of a number of radical Hindu and Hindu nationalist groups and sub-groups. While most of them have existed prior to Modi’s electoral victory, they have gained great visibility and media prominence in the past three years. It comes as no surprise that membership numbers are on the rise and groups exercise significant public demonstrations of their ambitions – without fear of accountability or punishment.

For instance, on 13 June 2017, a mob of around 200 Hindu cow vigilantes attacked a government convoy carrying cattle from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu for a government-sponsored breeding programme. Around 50 individuals have been charged with assault, while some members of the police have also been questioned for not acting promptly. This is the second violent incident related to cow vigilantism in Rajasthan in just two months. Other similar incidents have taken place in Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Also, much of the violence has been directed at Muslims and Dalits who often form the most marginalised sections of Indian society. This has led to increased cynicism towards the Modi administration’s commitment to the Indian ideal of secularism.

Religious Triumphalist?

While Modi is unabashed in portraying himself as a proud Hindu nationalist, he has actively called for people of all faiths to coexist peacefully. Yet, his critics have pointed out that he has been largely silent about increasing incidences of violence, aggression, and discrimination in the name of Hinduism by purportedly radical Hindu mobs, determined to assert their cultural and religious superiority.

Historian Richard Landes calls this phenomenon ‘triumphalist religiosity’, in which believers consider non-believers inferior, such that they attempt to justify their own religiosity publicly. In the case of cow vigilantism, the perpetrators are self-proclaimed gaurakshaks or “cow protectors” who believe that defending cows is their ordained religious duty. Thus, public mob lynching and targeting minorities become rational actions for them.

The context for the surge in violence by so-called gaurakshaks is mired in a deep political squabble between the BJP and opposition parties on the issue of cow slaughter. The RSS has called on a nationwide ban on the slaughter of cows, even though many poorer sections of society depend on beef for consumption and India is the biggest exporter of beef in the world.

Despite this, the central government has issued a nationwide ban announced on 26 May 2017 on purchasing and selling cattle for slaughter, citing illegal animal trade as a justification. This has resulted in outcry in states such as Kerala, Nagaland, and Meghalaya where beef consumption is high. However, the central government’s actions of restricting the sale of cows is seen to legitimise cow vigilantes who are perceived to be enforcing the government’s mandate on the streets.

Modi’s Political Legitimacy Under Threat

Modi the Hindu reformer and moderniser cannot be seen as the benefactor of cow vigilantes and the killers of Muslims and Dalits. The spectre of cow vigilantism thus threatens to fracture Modi’s political legitimacy as well as stifle his attempts to expand the BJP’s appeal on the back of his popular brand image. Understanding this requires comprehending that the rise of Modi is a largely middle class phenomenon. His popularity today is due to his image as a rational moderniser and developer – an image that can be delegitimised if excesses of Hindu extremism are permitted.

Christophe Jaffrelot, an expert on Indian politics, has argued that a young, aspirational burgeoning middle class – that which Modi has referred to as a “neo-middle class” – perceives Modi to be a “super-CEO” and less of a politician. Distrustful of traditional politicians and disdainful of the legacy of dynastic politics and corruption, this neo-middle class forms the core of Modi’s new support base.

It constitutes a culturally Hindu imagined community made up of an increasingly young educated population, Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) living overseas and newly urbanised groups who share economic aspirations. With promises of strong economic growth rather than the maligned redistributive politics of old, Modi’s image as an economic reformer and development maverick is very attractive to the neo-middle class. Modi promises to make India great again.

Staying True to Moditva

The argument here is not one that prioritises economic development over Hindutva, but rather that Modi’s brand of politics, dubbed Moditva by political observers situates economic development and pragmatic, rational politics as the key driver of the rise of a powerful, prosperous Hindu India. Modi’s political legitimacy then lies in his ability to abstain from the excesses of Hindu nationalism and pursue Moditva with the drive and vision of politicians like Lee Kuan Yew whom he is often compared to by followers. The beef ban would result in a devastating economic blow to the industry, a deep contradiction to Modi’s development ambitions.

Serious questions must then be asked about whether the neo-middle class would remain supportive of a regime that overtly or tacitly supports mob justice which continually threatens to spill into communal violence. While there is discernible support for legislative action banning beef eating and instituting ‘cow protection’, cow-vigilantism is a different beast altogether. It will be seen as antithetical to Hindu values, inhumane, and counterproductive to the vision of economic growth and development. It will also question Modi’s legitimacy as a harbinger of economic prosperity and a strong peaceful Hindu rashtra or nation.

*Juhi Ahuja is a Senior Analyst and Pravin Prakash is an Associate Research Fellow with the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.